Two years later, in 1872, and without any intended relation to motion picture development, Leland Stanford, a California rail way magnate and sportsman, wished to investigate the gaits of the horse. Stanford assigned the photographic problem to John D. Isaacs, an engineer on the staff of the Central Pacific railway.
Isaacs contrived a battery of cameras with electrical shutter controls. The shutter mechanisms were improved and the speed of photographic materials was increased, permitting at last the first real photographic records of objects in rapid motion. Ex posures as brief of a second were made. Eadweard Muy bridge operated the Isaacs apparatus installed at Palo Alto on Stanford's stock farm. The pictures made were records in analy sis of motion. Synthesis was still to come. (A description of these experiments was published in Dr. Wellman's The Horse in Motion as shown by Instantaneous Photography, London, 1882.) While visiting in Paris, Stanford displayed some of these pic tures and word of them reached Jean Louis Meissonier, the painter, who was then in a heated controversy with French academicians over the postures of horses in his pictures. Meissonier sought Stanford and found vindication in the photographs from Cal ifornia. The artist prevailed on Stanford to send Muybridge to France. The differing academicians were confronted with the photographs, and as a final proof Meissonier synthesized the pho tographic analysis into motion pictures by projecting transparen cies on a machine similar to the Heyl phasmatrope.
The method evolved by Isaacs and operated by Muybridge resulted in a changing point of view for the pictures as the action swept past the battery of cameras. The pictures obtained, syn thesized on the screen gave the illusion of the moving object in a single spot while the scenery ran past. Wallace Goold Levison of Brooklyn, N.Y., devised a camera which exposed successive plates in a single camera, obviating this difficulty. It was utilized only for scientific demonstration.
Edison's Inventions.—In 1887, Thomas A. Edison of New Jersey, attacked the problem. He was aware of Muybridge's prod uct. But Edison's efforts were dominated entirely by the phono
graph idea. His first motion picture machine recorded spirals of tiny pictures on a cylinder, in the pattern of a phonograph groove. The pictures were given an intermittent motion and viewed under a microscope. The results were inadequate and Edison determined upon larger images to be handled on a tape or belt. He built a device for this purpose and experimented with various materials, including films made of collodion varnish coated with photographic emulsion. The material was unsatisfactory. In Aug. 1889, George Eastman of Rochester, N.Y., began the manu facture of photographic film on a nitro-cellulose base, a material evolved to meet the mechanical problems of "roller photography" for the Eastman Kodak. Edison heard of this material and pur chased a sample strip so ft. in length for $2.50 and tried it with success in his picture machine. The demonstration of the Edison kinetoscope at West Orange, N.J., on Oct. 6, 1889, with a strip of Eastman film made the motion picture an accomplished fact.
The Kinetoscope.—The kinetoscope was a peep-show device in which the film ran with a continuous movement between a magnifying lens and a light source. The capacity of the machine was limited to 5o f t., the length of the tables on which the film was manufactured, which gave a motion record of 48 exposures a second, and lasted about 13 seconds. The size of the film, the image and the arrangement of the sprocket holes by which the film was driven in that first machine, continue as the standard of the motion picture of to-day. The machine was patented by Edison in 1891 in the United States only. It stood idle in his laboratory until it came to the attention of Thomas R. Lombard, of Cornelia, Ga., a promoter of the phonograph, who sought it as a novelty for display at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. The machines, despite statements to the contrary, were not ready in time and made their first public appearance at a kinetoscope parlour at 1155 Broadway in New York city, April 14, 1894. Thus began the commercial history of the motion picture.